uniq

$ uniq deserts.txt

uniq stands for "unique" and filters out adjacent, duplicate lines in a file. Here uniq deserts.txt filters out duplicates of "Sahara Desert", because the duplicate of 'Sahara Desert' directly follows the previous instance. The "Kalahari Desert" duplicates are not adjacent, and thus remain.

$ sort deserts.txt | uniq

A more effective way to call uniq is to call sort to alphabetize a file, and "pipe" the standard output to uniq. Here by piping sort deserts.txt to uniq, all duplicate lines are alphabetized (and thereby made adjacent) and filtered out.

sort deserts.txt | uniq > uniq-deserts.txt

Here we simply send filtered contents to uniq-deserts.txt, which you can view with the cat command.